Introduction

The VPP platform is an extensible framework that provides out-of-the-box production quality switch/router functionality. It is the open source version of Cisco's Vector Packet Processing (VPP) technology: a high performance, packet-processing stack that can run on commodity CPUs.

The benefits of this implementation of VPP are its high performance, proven technology, its modularity and flexibility, and rich feature set.

Quick-start: On an existing Linux host

To install system dependencies, build VPP and then install it, simply run the build script. This should be performed a non-privileged user with sudo access from the project base directory:

./extras/vagrant/build.sh

If you want a more fine-grained approach because you intend to do some development work, the Makefile in the root directory of the source tree provides several convenience shortcuts as make targets that may be of interest. To see the available targets run:

make

Quick-start: Vagrant

The directory extras/vagrant contains a VagrantFile and supporting scripts to bootstrap a working VPP inside a Vagrant-managed Virtual Machine. This VM can then be used to test concepts with VPP or as a development platform to extend VPP. Some obvious caveats apply when using a VM for VPP since its performance will never match that of bare metal; if your work is timing or performance sensitive, consider using bare metal in addition or instead of the VM.